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Before the story
The season that turns your breath snow-white arrived. Whenever a page of the calendar flips over, the gruesome event that instills nightmares into everyone under the age of twenty slowly approaches—The university entrance exams.
Once this time comes around, it doesn’t matter if you’re part of a sports club or the go-home club. All the family restaurants and other establishments near the train station are crammed full from morning until evening, serving as a home to the stressed-out examinees. Like they’re in a life-or-death battle, they tightly grasp their pens, scribbling on their papers in a fast-paced rhythm.
“Phew…”
I1was sitting in a counter seat near the wall, playing with the ponytail hanging down my head as I rested my chin on my palm. Outside the window, I could see the very few remaining leaves on the trees beside the street swaying in the wind. Unlike the inside of this establishment, it was fairly cold outside.
When I was the club president of the track-and-field club, once this season rolled around, I was always busy thinking about a place where we could practice safely, but now I am simply an average human with average problems. Was this progress, or am I regressing? I couldn’t tell. Yet again I have come to realize how many things I don’t understand in this world.
“Hmmm…” Another sigh escaped my lips.
It was a meaningless sigh. It wasn’t even like me. I felt like a King of Animals who had lost its hunting ground and was just sitting around in this room. Like steel that had lost its shape. I’ve been thinking about this sort of stuff a lot as of late. Thanks to that, I made no progress solving the questions in the reference book I was working on.
Recently, I’ve been making the excuse that I’m focusing on modern Japanese, and I’ve been reading random books instead of actually studying. The National Center exam is next month. I do sometimes wonder if this is even something I should be doing as a current examinee, but since I was never really into reading books until now, I became even more hooked.
…Maybe I’ve been influenced by that man, who himself loves reading. I have no idea. I barely know anything in this world. Maybe that’s why I’m searching for different stories to deepen my knowledge. I read a lot of books.
For example, Run, Melos!2, I Am a Cat3, as well as Sangetsuki4. Then there’s short stories, which the person I like tends to read a lot, like A Wise Man’s Gift and Miyazawa Kenji Poetry Anthology. I’ve even tried out works that come from overseas such as War and Peace5 and The Metamorphosis6. I’ve also been recommended works of the light novel (?) genre. I personally liked Welcome to the N.H.K7 a lot. That story felt like the characters were trying to find a reason for existing in a world they didn’t understand, singing a hymn of life into the unknown.
As a side note, I’ve read a novel fairly similar to it before. It was Tsukiko’s greatest work to date, the so-called ‘Yokodera-kun notes’ compiled into eleven volumes. However, they had been burned atop the hill with a single cedar, so they don’t exist in this world anymore.
I don’t know what they—Yokodera Youto and Tsutsukakushi Tsukiko—were thinking when they burned them, but it was their decision, so I will respect it.
Anyway, after the fire burned everything, there was only one literary fragment left behind. I begged the literature man—Yokodera—to let me borrow it. It was the size of a short story, nothing world-changing. It merely existed in this world as a coincidence, not even missed when the rest of it had been burned.
Yet because it was such a meaningless story, it felt like I could truly experience this different world, and I read it over and over.
For example, there was a story such as this…
1 Watashi, not Boku = Not the protag
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